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Trial-to-trial variability in the responses of neurons carries information about stimulus location in the rat whisker thalamus
Journal article   Open access

Trial-to-trial variability in the responses of neurons carries information about stimulus location in the rat whisker thalamus

Alessandro Scaglione, Karen A. Moxon, Juan Aguilar and Guglielmo Foffani
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, v 108(36), pp 14956-14961
06 Sep 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1103168108
PMID: 21873241
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https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1103168108View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Maybe Open Access (Publisher Bronze),  Open

Abstract

Multidisciplinary Sciences Science & Technology Science & Technology - Other Topics
From the perspective of neural coding, the considerable trial-to-trial variability in the responses of neurons to sensory stimuli is puzzling. Trial-to-trial response variability is typically interpreted in terms of "noise" (i.e., it represents either intrinsic noise of the system or information unrelated to the stimuli). However, trial-to-trial response variability can be considerably different across stimuli, suggesting that it could also provide an important contribution to the information conveyed by the neural responses about the stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we addressed the problem of discriminating stimulus location from the spike-count responses of neurons recorded in the ventro-postero-medial (VPM) nucleus of the thalamus in anesthetized rats. Using a recently developed information theory approach, we verified that differences between stimuli in the trial-to-trial spike-count variability of the responses provided an important contribution to the overall information carried by the neurons. In addition, we found that the relatively reliable (sub-Poisson) firing regime of our VPM neurons was not only more informative, but also more redundant between neurons compared with a more variable (Poisson) firing regime with the same total number of spikes. The typical increase in trial-to-trial response variability from the periphery to the cortex could therefore serve as a strategy to reduce redundancy between neurons and promote efficient sparse coding distributed in large populations of neurons. Overall, our data suggest that the trial-to-trial response variability plays a critical role in establishing the trade-off between total information and redundancy between neurons in population codes.

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